Transition to a new blog: "The Teeming Brain"

Hello after a very long pause! As you may have noticed if you're one of the people who has been checking this blog regularly since I started it last Fall, I haven't updated it for several months. The reasons for this are various, but the upshot is this: Effective as of this moment, I'm transitioning to another blog. It's one where I'll be able to maintain the momentum that I gathered at this one, but will also be able to post about a wider variety of subjects than I've limited myself to here. This means I won't be updating Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic any more, although I'll leave the blog in existence and may even link back occasionally to the posts I made here.

The new blog is titled The Teeming Brain. A chatty introductory post is already live and waiting for you to read it, along with some information about me on the "About Matt Cardin" page. As time goes by I'll be posting cultural rants like the ones here, as well as posts about books and authors, philosophy and religion, music, movies, and more. I'll talk about my personal musical project titled Daemonyx and will even provide some mp3 samples of songs. I hope to see you there!

Possible Apocalypses

Not to be unduly melodramatic or negative, but the world is coming to an end. I see three complementary modes in which this is happening:

1. Culture-Death -- In a paragraph at the end of his indispensible book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman famously said the following: "When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility." I trust the fact that his description applies directly and comprehensively to contemporary American cultural life needs no argument or support. A simple glance around the place makes things glaringly evident. When we talk about culture-death, we're talking about the type of society Ray Bradbury wrote about in Fahrenheit 451, where people immerse themselves perpetually in fun and games -- e.g., amusement parks, reckless fast driving, sports-sports-sports, and especially, above all, television -- and down endless doses of tranquilizers to keep themselves from wigging out. They all say they're happy, and they claim that reading or trying to think about deep and subtle ideas makes people unhappy. But their actions belie their claim to contentment; as Montag, the protagonist of the novel, notices to his horror, suicides and murders are commonplace, and everybody is so zoned out that nobody cares to remember the past. He and his wife Mildred realize that they can't even remember when they met. This is the very definition of a Dark Age: a period when cultural memory has been lost. Currently we're in a situation where cultural memory is being lost. Much has already gone out the window. Have you talked to a fifteen year old lately? Or a twenty-five year old? Or even somebody your own age? There's a great quip from the Church of the Subgenius: "Consider how stupid the average person is. Then consider the fact that mathematically, by definition, half of them are even stupider than that." The average level of stupidity -- and let's also factor in ignorance -- has skyrocketed over the past few decades. Welcome to the new Dark Age.
2. Industrial Collapse -- Have you heard of peak oil? Are you following the news? Did you hear President Bush announce just a couple of weeks ago in his State of the Union Address that America is "addicted to oil"? Did you hear him talk about reducing oil imports from the Middle East by seventy-five percent by the year 2025? Did you hear him mention that America needs to "move beyond a petroleum-based economy"? My Bible isn't in front of me right now, but I'm pretty sure those words, spoken by Bush, appear in Revelation when an angel breaks some sort of seal. To hear those words coming out of Bush's mouth is tantamount to hearing the Pope claim that we need to move into a post-Roman Catholic world. Bush is an oil man of many years' standing, and for him to announce that there's an oil problem means you can be confident that it's much, much worse than he's saying. In fact, the issue of peak oil -- the term refers to the peak point of oil production, beyond which production capacity can never be increased, and it's fairly certain that we just reached it globally a few months ago or will do so some time in the next three or four years -- has been a flashing red light for a very long time now. Go ahead, do a Google search for the term if you're not already aware of it. In particular, try reading an essay by James Kunstler titled "The Long Emergency." Try visiting www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net and reading the first few paragraphs. Watch the streaming video report from Australia titled Real Oil Crisis and then ask yourself why the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not to mention New Zealand television and the BBC, are talking openly about this while you're not hearing a whole lot about it in the American media. Quite simply, peak oil is What's Going On globally right now, and we in America have a front row seat for the main event. We may end up wishing we didn't have. Are you ready for $100-per-barrel oil? Or higher? Can you imagine America transforming into a Third World country within, oh, say, five to thirty years? As in, within the lifetime of most of us alive today? It just may happen.
   
3. Ecological Meltdown -- Global warming may have been controversial once, but the list of reputable and even renowned individuals and institutions that have now officially signed onto supporting it is overwhelming. Plus, there's the fact that we just finished the warmest January and the worst hurricane season on historical record. Are we ready for Katrina-sized hurricanes every year? Are we ready for catastrophic rises in sea levels? Are we ready for catastrophic drought? Will the Powers that Be prove themselves any less inept in handling these eventualities than they proved themselves to be in their response to Katrina? How about when the society built around heavy industrialism, which has been predicated entirely upon access to cheap clean oil, is collapsing all around them -- all around us -- in the midst of the chaos because of the peak oil crisis mentioned above?

That's enough cheer for now. I may pursue some of these themes in coming days and weeks at this blog -- as time and the daimon permit.

To a troubled student

In my capacity as a public high school teacher, it sometimes happens that I am approached by a student who asks me for advice regarding a personal crisis. On a couple of occasions, including one very recent one, the crisis has been centered upon the subject of religion. The school where I teach is located in an extremely rural pocket of the American Midwest, and so, as is common in such areas, the dominant community religious affiliation is a very conservative Protestant evangelicalism. Even some of the more mainline denominational churches out here, such as the Methodists and Presbyterians, often possess a distinctly greater evangelical flavor than they do elsewhere.

This, in tandem with the related political and social conservatism that characterizes the area, can make for a cultural atmosphere that seems distinctly oppressive, especially for young persons who are just beginning to question things. The typical religious crisis for a teen around here involves a first awakening to doubt. A particularly bright and self-aware teen may begin to realize that the only reason he or she subscribes to his or her inherited belief system is because, well, it’s inherited. “I’ve always been taught these things,” the teen will say, “but how do I really know they’re true? How does anybody know them?” This is a severely destabilizing experience for anybody, but it can be especially difficult when it occurs to a person who is surrounded by family, friends, and authority figures who view such questioning as threatening and bad.

So I’ve decided to use my blog here to offer my generalized response to the students who have come to me with this problem, and also to those who may do so in the future. This particular post thus represents a break from my customary ill-tempered outbursts. Not to worry; I’ll return to form in the near future.

And so. . .

* * * * *

I’m glad you felt comfortable coming to me with your problem. It’s good to know that you feel relaxed enough with me to broach such a serious personal issue. I’ve been told by several people that I’m always “questioning things” in my classroom, referring specifically to religious beliefs, social issues, and the like. More than one parent has told me this was the message their son or daughter brought home about my classes. I’m honestly not sure how I generate this impression, because I don’t know of a single thing I say or do that even approaches the edge of the proverbial envelope, let alone pushes it. Maybe I’m just so inherently out of step with the prevailing religious and social attitudes and assumptions down here that I don’t even notice it. Maybe I push the envelope because I’ve forgotten how near its leading edge lies, even though I, too, was raised in this area.

Speaking of which, back when I was in high school I experienced a crisis of doubt similar to your own. I was raised in a church and a town similar to yours, and as a teen I, too, began to doubt everything that I had been told. Once this questioning started, it never really ended but instead went on to become a central part of who I am. So more than merely sympathizing with you, I identify with you and want to offer all the help I can. I’m not sure that I have any genuine wisdom to pass on, but as somebody who has journeyed a considerable distance down the path that it seems you’ve just entered upon, maybe I can at least offer a little guidance and advice.

If I have any useful advice at all, it boils down to this: You shouldn’t feel in the least bit guilty for doubting and questioning your inherited religious beliefs. In fact, you should work to increase the scope and precision of the very questions that are troubling you, because it’s only by doing this that you’re going to learn how to state the exact nature of what’s bothering you. And until you can state your questions precisely, you won’t know how to answer them. There’s a very good case to be made for the idea that a person doesn’t really “own” a belief unless he or she has questioned it and arrived at a real reason for it. Short of that, you’re merely following a program like a robot or computer. You merely believe things because you’ve been taught them, and if you ever happen to encounter challenges to these beliefs, you perceive these challenges as threats, and the only way you can keep your faith intact is to blindly reassert your beliefs without really understanding what you’re saying. And this is satisfying to no one, least of all to you.

So I would encourage you to “stay with” your questions, maybe even to write them down and reflect on them deeply in order to get to the bottom of what’s really troubling you. Can you articulate to yourself the general nature of what’s bothering you in just one or two statements or questions? Obviously it goes far beyond any specific question about a given doctrinal issue. For example, let’s say you’re questioning the traditional story that Satan rebelled against God and was expelled from heaven, and that he now rules hell and somehow exerts an evil influence on planet earth. If you have noticed that this is a rather strange story, and you’re perceiving problems and contradictions in it, and you’re wondering how in the world anybody ever came up with it, and furthermore, why anybody would believe it or teach it to others, doesn’t your question extend beyond this single issue? Aren’t you asking more generally about all such stories and beliefs? And isn’t your question not just about reasons for believing or disbelieving these stories, but more profoundly, about religious knowledge in general? Aren’t you asking how it’s possible, or even if it’s possible, really to know such things at all? And when you ask this, aren’t you asking about the nature of authority itself, as in the claim that the Bible is “God’s word,” completely without error and entirely sufficient on its own for achieving salvation? How does anybody know that? Where does such a claim come from?

I could keep going with this ferreting-out of some of the deeper issues and ramifications of basic, surface-level religious questions, but I’ll refrain because the only thing that’s really going to work is for you to do this for yourself. As for the best way to go about it, I’ve found that it’s been most useful to me, in fact it’s been encouraging, inspiring, and even exhilarating, to read the words of other people who have worked their way through similar problems. You don’t feel quite so odd and alone when you see that all kinds of people—intelligent, good people, including some of the most respected people in the world—have struggled with the same issues.

To take only one example, you might consider reading Jesus: What He Really Said and Did by Stephen Mitchell. Please understand that in pointing you to this particular book, I’m not suggesting that it represents “The Answer.” I merely choose it because in the introduction, Mitchell describes his experiences with exactly the same kinds of thoughts that are plaguing you. His background is different than yours or mine (he’s a Jew by birth) but his inner experience is still very similar, and I think it might prove helpful for you to read this account of a very sensitive and intelligent person’s way of working these things out. Mitchell is a world-renowned literary scholar and translator whose sensitivity and keenness of thought is vividly apparent in his writing.

Note, however, that the answer he arrives at would certainly be viewed as shocking and heretical by your church, since his position is that Jesus was not the unique “son of God” and savior of the world, as orthodox historical Christianity teaches, but was instead a deeply enlightened spiritual teacher of the same type as the Buddha, Lao Tzu (the supposed founder of Taoism), and many others. Thus, he believes that the whole mass of theological stories and ideas that compose orthodox Christianity, the whole package of beliefs that you told me you’re wondering about, is just a bunch of mythology that doesn’t represent the true heart of Jesus’ message. Nor is he alone in this; an army of respected historical figures, including such prominent Americans as Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain, have held the same opinion. So do a host of contemporary Christian denominations, including the Disciples of Christ, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists. I don’t mean they equate Jesus with the Buddha, but that they reject in part or in whole the mythological-seeming aspects of the Jesus story that are so very central to the fundamentalist and evangelical form of the religion that you’re growing up with. I remember being quite surprised as a teen, and even when I was in my twenties, to learn more about this, since I had been raised to believe that “Christianity,” generically and universally, was the type that I had been taught, whereas in fact the breadth of opinions and beliefs among different varieties of Christians is vast.

However, as I already said, I’m not telling you that Stephen Mitchell and others who believe like him have “The Answer.” I simply offer his book to you as an example of the way one person has dealt with the questions. Others who faced similar crises of doubt have gone an entirely different direction by returning to a much-reinforced traditional Christian faith. One of the most notable of these is C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia and probably the most widely read and beloved Christian author of the twentieth century. He was raised a Christian but then went on a spiritual journey from atheism through various philosophical systems and back again to orthodox Christianity. His nonfiction books represent some of the most intelligent statements of the traditional historical Christian faith that you’re going to find, and they offer plenty of arguments and reasons for why one should believe that way.

Speaking of which, you may not be aware that Christian theology, meaning all the beliefs that various Christians hold about God and the way the universe is set up, didn’t just get handed down from heaven. Christian belief has a very long history that involves a lot of very intelligent people, and also a lot of very unintelligent people, and some nice people, and some self-serving people, and compassionate people, and intolerant people, and honest people, and dishonest people, and fanatics, and reasonable people, all of them debating and arguing with each other about what Jesus really meant and taught, and how he was and is related to God, and who or what God is, and how we should therefore believe and behave and worship, and what is the meaning of the scriptures that have been handed down to us, and so on. If you delve into this history—and the resources are readily available in libraries and on the Internet—you’ll find there’s a lot more to your inherited religion than you’re currently aware of.

On the other hand, there are people who have started questioning their religion and have ended up as total skeptics, agnostics, and atheists. I’m sure you know what atheism means. Skeptics and agnostics believe that it’s impossible to know the answer to questions about God and other such matters, and so they learn to live with uncertainty. They even preach it as a virtue, since a person who doesn’t think that he has the ultimate answer to everything will be unlikely to turn into a fanatic and oppress or kill other people the way religious zealots have done throughout history.

So the point is that once you start doubting and questioning, and not only that, but sharpening and clarifying your questions and honestly following them where they lead, there’s no guarantee where you’ll land. I urge you to hold on tight to your inner freedom to ask these honest questions and follow them wherever they take you. Truth can’t be hurt by questions; rather, it can only be discovered by means of them. I remember being angered when I was a teen by people who, although they might say my religious questioning was permissible or even valuable, wanted to determine the outcome of it in advance. It was as if they were telling me, “Yes, it’s fine to question things—but only if you end up back here with the right answers!” That attitude spells the death of intellectual and spiritual inquiry since it assumes the answers are already settled from the start, so in the end, why even question? Don’t listen to people when they lay that kind of thing on you. And trust me, they will do it, whether in person or in the books you read. There’s a very inferior type of “Christian” book that is based on this very approach, which doesn’t seek answers so much as offer rationalizations for “answers” that are supposedly already known. These books fill many shelves in the religious or devotional sections of bookstores. There are also many such writings scattered all over the Internet. So I urge you to beware of them. If you’re reading something and notice that the author isn’t actually encouraging you to think for yourself, but is instead offering pat rationalizations for prefabricated answers, then you’re in bad hands. And of course it isn’t just Christian authors who do this; people advancing the cause of other faith traditions, and also of atheism and other secular beliefs, can be and often are guilty of the same.

And now a word of caution: It’s all too easy, when you’re really in the midst of a personal crisis of doubt, to begin to regard everyone around you as zombies. You hear your preacher and parents and teachers and friends spouting the same old beliefs that you yourself are now recognizing for the first time as highly questionable, and your tendency is to fall into an attitude of scorn and resentment toward everyone. Maybe this is inevitable, maybe a person simply has to go through it—I know I did, and still do—but it’s nevertheless valuable to bear in mind that you don’t know for sure what all these people are thinking and feeling. You don’t know for sure that they haven’t experienced and thought the same things as you. Maybe their present attitudes are the products of inner crises that they themselves have faced. And even if not, even if these people really are living unreflectively and treating you unfairly by squashing your honest questions and condemning you for daring to think for yourself, it’s only natural for them to care about your inner life if they really care about you. Especially when it comes to your parents, it’s only natural for them to worry if it seems that you’re doubting or rejecting what they’ve worked hard to teach you. It’s natural for your friends, especially the ones who don’t share your reflectiveness and therefore haven’t begun to question their own beliefs, to misunderstand or even judge you when they hear your doubts about the religious doctrines that you and they have been taught.

Which is all to say that you should consider working to maintain an attitude of tolerance and compassion toward these people. I might also suggest, based on all this, that your questions at this point are better directed at yourself than at others. As I think you’ve already discovered the hard way, it might be the wise course not to talk too much about these things unless you’re fairly confident you’re talking to someone who won’t take them the wrong way. One of the most visible characteristics of your town is its distinct parochialism in social, political, and religious matters. (If you don’t know the meaning of “parochialism,” look it up.) You may think you’re already aware of this, but I promise you that you can’t truly understand it until you’ve gotten some distance on the place, whether by physically moving somewhere else or by enlarging your perspective through books. People in places like this like to forget—either that, or else never find out to begin with—that they’re living in a tiny, isolated pocket of rural culture whose fundamental attitudes and assumptions aren’t shared by everybody everywhere. If they ever talk about “the way things are,” all too often they confuse the way things are right here, for them, with the way things are for everyone. This isn’t to slam your hometown; all rural areas are the same throughout the United States and the rest of the world, and there is, in fact, much to praise about the way of life in these places as compared to the way of life in more populous and urbanized areas. But I do understand from personal experience that it can feel overwhelmingly restrictive, to the point of making you claustrophobic, to grow up in a place like this, which is why is why I mention the issue. You’ll notice that I myself have chosen to make a life in this area even though I don’t see things the way most people around here do. Maybe that should tell you something.

A final thought: You may find that the things you read and study in school seem more significant to you now that you’ve begun to question things. It’s easy when you’re young to view the authors, books, ideas, and information that you’re presented with in school as just more of the same boring stuff that your life has always presented to you. But when you wake up and begin to realize that everything isn’t necessarily the way you’ve always been told, it can make history and books come alive because when you read, for example, the history of European religious controversies in the 16^th century, or when you read a poet’s or novelist’s expression of religious curiosity or anguish, or any of a thousand other things, you now realize personally that these things involved real people asking real questions because they were really important to their real lives. You find that you actually feel the significance of history, art, literature, science, in a way that you never did before. And this is one of the most valuable, life-enriching things that can happen to a person.

And finally, a suggested reading list, and a very short one so as not to overwhelm you:

Books:

• Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis—This is available in bookstores everywhere. It’s probably the single most read and referenced theological book in the English language. It also presents complex and profound ideas couched in quite readable prose.
• The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts—This one presents a view of Christianity, and of religion in general, that is quite different from that of Lewis. In general it’s more like Mitchell’s Jesus: What He Said and Did, but with important differences. Watts, like Lewis, was a hugely influential writer.
• Faith, Reason, and Doubt, an online book at http://hypermetrics.com/personal/frd.html—I haven’t read this one in its entirety, but by browsing it I’ve seen that it deals directly with your struggle. The author describes his awakening to doubt and his eventual recovery of an informed, reasonable Christian faith.
• The Christian Agnostic by Leslie Weatherhead—Late in the book Weatherhead becomes preoccupied with paranormal phenomena, but early on he deals with the issue of people who have trouble believing many of the traditional Christian stories and claims but still want to remain Christian. I’m not sure whether this one is still in print; you may have to look to a used bookseller.

Other readings:

• www.infidels.org—This is the Website for the Internet Infidels, where people who self-style themselves to be infidels, which means nonbelievers in anything religious or spiritual, gather to share essays, conversations, and more. If you browse the site, you can find people’s accounts of having completely given up all of their religious beliefs. It’s a gathering place for atheists and skeptics and such. The last I knew, many people had posted their personal stories of being deconverted from the Christianity of their youth. Beware, though, of the raw hostility to religion that is sometimes apparent at this site. I know you’re not used to encountering this.
• “Great Doubt, Great Awakening,” a sermon by a Presbyterian minister at http://www.bmpc.org/Sermons/Sermon_of_April_18_2004.htm
• “The Centrality of Doubt,” a sermon by a Presbyterian minister at http://www.fprespa.org/centrality.htm
• “Doubt, Faith, and Truth,” an essay http://www.ncethicalsociety.org/rb.doubt.faith.html
• “Philosophy Talk,” a blog to accompany a radio show of the same title, at http://theblog.philosophytalk.org (see the January 8^th, 2005 entry)
• “Faith and doubt,” an essay at http://www.rationalnorth.com/faith%20and%20doubt.htm
• “Doubt: The Tides of Faith,” an article at http://www.anewkindofchristian.com/archives/000159.html

Quotations on the value of doubting:

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers

—Voltaire

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

—Rene Descartes

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure. The same sort of assurance is demanded, in later life, of those who undertake to lead populations into the Promised Land. Liquidate the capitalists and the survivors will enjoy eternal bliss. Exterminate the Jews and everyone will be virtuous. Kill the Croats and let the Serbs reign. These are samples of the slogans that have won wide popular acceptance in our time. Even a modicum of philosophy would make it impossible to accept such bloodthirsty nonsense. But so long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues. For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy.

—Bertrand Russell

You tell me, doubt is Devil-born. . .

There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is—it is her shadow.

—Ambrose Bierce

Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.

—George Iles

Talk to me about the varied practices of faith and I will listen gladly. Talk to me about the challenges of faith and I will listen attentively. But don't come talking to me about the certainties of faith or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

—C.S. Lewis

To doubt, to really doubt, seriously, is to rise to the level of the person whose thoughts one is doubting, to wrestle with angels so to speak. To doubt seriously is the only route to developing one's individuality. . . . Persons who do not doubt their own thoughts at times, do not really wish to know the truth.

—Richard Feringer

This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields. It was born of a struggle. It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure. And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away. I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.

—Richard Feynman

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

—W.K. Clifford

The Revaluation and Devaluation of Education in the Brave New McWorld

The issue: that in today’s societal and cultural milieu, formal education has been devalued by being recast as a means to an end, and not as something of value in itself. That the ideal of education not only as preparation for practical life, but more importantly, as the molding of young people’s minds and characters so that they will become lifelong students of the best and highest human cultural achievements, has been subverted by a pernicious pragmatism in support of the consumerist ideology that has hijacked America’s self-identity in recent decades.

If you will forgive a rather long-winded and meandering route to establishing the above point:

Among teens today, or at least among the sixty-five odd ones that I spend most of my waking hours with, the attitude is rampant that if school is good for anything at all, then what it’s good for is to “help you in life.” Whether the education in question is a terminal high school diploma or a college degree, being “helped in life” is the ultimate benefit to be conferred by it.

And what does being “helped in life” amount to? Specifically, it amounts to enabling a person to “get a Good Job.” Education also helps you to “keep your job.” Sometimes it even helps you to “do a good job at your job.” And always, that “Good Job” is located in a distant land, shimmering like a mirage on the horizon, known as “the Real World.”

The above responses are courtesy of the several classes of high school students, ranging from 15 to 18 years of age, to whom I have posed the question of school’s value. Of what use, I have asked them, is your formal schooling to you? Specifically, what about the “core subjects” of language arts, history, math, and science? Why should you care about learning these things? Do you, in fact, care about them? Can you say or see whether or why they might have a value for you individually? As in, a personal value? Or if not, then what the hell are you doing spending long hours with me here in this stuffy little classroom, especially if you’re 16 or older and are thus legally free to opt out of school? (In one of my classes I have actually left the “hell” in there for shock value, and have managed to deflect disapproval for it away from myself by phrasing the question in rhetorical terms, as if it is something that somebody, not necessarily me, might ask. You can’t be too careful in a rural Midwestern town possessed of firmly conservative evangelical Christian values and attitudes.)

Among those teens who have managed to come up with a response at all, a few have displayed admirable honesty in averring that among their main reasons for staying in school are parental pressures and expectations. These students simply don’t want to disappoint their parents, and they certainly don’t want to incur their parents’ wrath.

Then there’s the fact that for many of them, the idea of dropping out of high school is unthinkable because it carries the inextricable connotation of being a bum and a loser. In other words, although I suspect not a one of my students would ever think of the matter consciously in these terms, graduating from high school is a social class distinction, and they cannot and will not for a moment consider the possibility of failing to achieve it.

But even given this range of alternative initial answers to my query, the ultimate answer, the one these teens unanimously gravitate toward when I press them further, boils down to this: “We go to school so that we can get Good Jobs in the Real World.” Some of them state it directly. Others simply nod their assent. All apparently assume not only that it is the “right” answer and a “serious” answer, but that it’s the only viable one to give.

Now, quite obviously the question is one that none of them has ever thought about before, which means that the answer they give is not a considered opinion, but is instead a parroted one that they have received from a third-party source. And what, exactly, is this source? Where have these teens heard this platitude spoken so many times that they have adopted it as their own? Where do they continue to hear it spoken on an almost daily basis, to the point where they sometimes express annoyance at it even when it is the only answer they can think to offer when pressed for a justification of their staying in school?

Specifically, they hear it in the school environment itself, from the mouths of myriad teachers and school administrators who have chanted it for years like a mantra. They hear it, for instance, whenever they buck the authority of an assistant principal and are subsequently delivered a lecture about the necessity of staying in school and respecting political authority in order to be “prepared for life.”

They hear it from school guidance counselors who process them en masse through prefabricated career testing and screening exercises, and who justify the whole thing by making reference to that ever-looming “Real World” and the necessity of achieving, by means of what one learns in school, a modicum of success and happiness in it.

They hear it whenever they complain about a homework assignment or test, or achieve a low grade, or challenge a teacher with the age-old question, “Why do we have to know this?” and receive in response an extempore mini-lecture on the importance of the subject matter at hand for success in the “Real World.” This mini-lecture is sometimes delivered with an air or earnestness. At other times it is delivered with an air of annoyance. Still other times it is delivered with a subtle air of repressed panic, as if the teacher is suddenly desperate to assert his authority and quell any questions or doubts about the justifiability of what he is teaching and how he is teaching it (and also, I might add, about the justifiability of the teaching profession itself).

I myself received this answer several times from my own high school teachers in the 1980s, and when I entered the teaching profession a few years ago I noticed it being passed on to students by the current generation of teachers, and also by teachers to others of their own ilk whenever they engaged in the frequent student-bashing conversations that I have discovered all teachers are prone to. It seems the “Real World” cliché possesses a kind of immortality. But its longevity does not by any means indicate that it is correct.

Because, after all, think about it: if school is contrasted semantically with “Real Life” in the “Real World” out there, what does this do to life inside the school? Obviously, it relegates it to the status of the unreal. And if education and all that it represents is framed as a mere means to an end, then it is relegated to the status of the merely provisional. You only do it because you have to if you want to move on to the things that are really important, at which point you will gladly leave it behind. And you do it in an environment that is openly acknowledged by everyone to be phony, bogus, a mere contrivance of a rehearsal that you perform only grudgingly in preparation for the real show.

Students, teachers, staff, and administrators cannot help but pick up on these assumptions, which poison the very foundations of what the whole enterprise is ostensibly about. And this all goes on while career politicians (out there in the “Real World”) continue to spout ear-pleasing platitudes about the noble nature of what the schools are out to accomplish. Their fatuousness rubs off on all of us who have ever preached even once to a student about the value of school, in its current form, in the current cultural situation, for his or her personal life. This is not to say that some young people don’t occasionally derive authentic personal and professional benefits from their experiences in the schools—most often, perhaps, from teachers who manage to remain human and humane enough to keep their wits about them in the face of heavy pressures to capitulate to the contemporary insanity. But it is to say that whenever this happens, it happens not because of the system and the institutions that embody it, but in spite of them.

* * * * *

The more I observe and consider the matter, the more I am convinced that this verbal and attitudinal, not to mention platitudinal, subjugation of the value of education to supposed pragmatic “real world” values is all a part of the legacy of John Dewey’s educational philosophy and the related progressive education movement from the early twentieth century. In a nutshell, Dewey was a philosophical pragmatist who urged that the ultimate value of education should be found in the “real world” results it produces, in terms of people’s abilities to perform the concrete duties of citizens, family members, and generally competent human beings. He believed the best way to motivate students to learn is to show them the practical significance of their school studies for life at large in the world outside the classroom.

There is good reason that Dewey is widely recognized as the most influential educational theorist of the twentieth century. Today his ideas have become almost rote in contemporary educational theory, as witnessed in, for example, the various “school-to-work” programs that abound across the nation. Here in Missouri we have the state-sponsored “A+” program, wherein the state of Missouri pledges to pay two years of tuition to a technical or community college for high school students who meet minimum standards of academic performance, attendance, and personal conduct. The A+ program is explicitly intended to produce more workers to fill technical and other hands-on jobs. A central aspect of the program is the way it centers a person’s entire high school experience around the issue of career choice; from the start of their freshman year, students are led to choose among various predefined “career paths” and to plan their choice of high school courses accordingly. Thus, they are encouraged by official institutional pressures to regard their education not as any kind of end in itself, or as something that might aim properly at a lifelong extension of itself, but as mere job preparation. Which is to say that they are led to regard education as a means to some other, more worthy end—life in that “Real World” again.

Of course the practical, career-based value of formal education has always been a crucial aspect of it, and is not something to be downplayed or dismissed. But in the present situation this particular focus has swollen to pathological proportions and is now in danger of killing the very thing it is intended to invigorate. Students have always been apathetic and lazy to some degree; this is just a part of human nature. But the present epidemic of laziness and apathy among American high schools goes well beyond this. It is symptomatic of some very deep underlying troubles, the causes are surely multifarious, but one of which is surely the obsessive focus on education as preparation for a Good Job in the Real World.

How can students really learn to love and enjoy the study of the world’s best literature, or the study of history, or the study of science, or the study of mathematics, with the kind of passion that animates great men and women to produce the best work in all of these human endeavors, when they are told that the study of these things is purely instrumental? In other words, how can they learn to love learning when they are told openly, emphatically, and regularly that this kind of learning is only a means to an end instead of something to be valued in itself? And how can teachers teach in this sort of situation when their administrators and, beyond them, the state, hold overhead the official goal of producing career-minded graduates to populate the “workplace,” that pervasive and pernicious euphemism that has come along in recent years to mask the death of an authentic work environment?

The issue is thus tied into the wider issue of America’s transformation into what political scientist Benjamin Barber has famously dubbed “McWorld,” meaning the contemporary consumerist “paradise” controlled by a handful of multinational corporations and characterized by the reduction of life to a glamorized and valorized frenzy of shopping and entertainment. According to this view of things, citizenship now means consumerism and American policy both foreign and domestic is geared almost entirely toward the end of remaking the world into a giant shopping mall where huge moneyed interests can sell their goods. It’s not a cheerful picture for those of us who still cling to old-fashioned humanist values, but a glance at contemporary culture as magnified in the mass media and verified in one’s own personal, immediate experience confirms much, if not all, of the McWorld characterization.

In such a situation, the public schools, which have long been recognized and utilized as one of the primary means of enculturation in democratic societies, will of course reshape themselves to reflect and perpetuate the consumerist ideology. Hence, the rise of Missouri’s A+ program and all of its kindred programs across the nation. To the ears of many, any condemnation of such a program must surely sound like the most monstrous kind of cynicism. After all, thanks to these programs many thousands of young people who would not otherwise have access to a college education now find it within their grasp. How can this be bad? How could any decent person criticize it?

Ah, but the question is, what will these young people do with that education? Moreover, what kind of education will they receive in such a situation, where the whole process is enabled and driven by a very specific set of ideological and institutional assumptions? What kinds of people will this lead them become? What kinds of attitudes will they espouse? How will they relate to the spiritually deathlike culture of consumerism that has not only infected America, but has now become America? Will their education wake them up to a recognition that there is something more to life than shopping and procreating? Will it even have a chance of doing so when it has been reduced to a mere means to an end, an instrument for turning out the workers necessary to man the “workplace” and keep the engine of commerce running smoothly?

Obviously, these last speculations are highly speculative indeed. And it is here that I should point out that I do not, in fact, believe things will ever proceed quite as smoothly as the architects of the modern commercial-social-educational revisionism have planned. For I witness on a daily basis, at close range, the apathy and restlessness that have become entrenched in our schools. Perhaps this is cause for optimism. Perhaps it is a sign that we humans are not as easy to dupe, mold, and control as the powers that be would like to think. Perhaps it indicates that when the great books, discoveries, stories, ambitions, adventures, philosophies, of the past—in short, the treasure trove of the human experience that is properly the start and long-range end of education—have been reframed as mere means to a well-adjusted life of making money and buying things, then human nature will balk. Young people thrown into such a situation will sense the senselessness of the way the subject matter is presented to them, they will detect the meaningless and insipidness of what is really being taught them, and they will overtly, actively refuse to participate.

The fault, then, is not in the things to be taught and learned in a formal education, but rather in the way they have been reframed and represented by contemporary educational ideology and praxis. Given that this ideology is simply one aspect, one arm, one wing, of the cultural ideology as a whole, it is difficult to believe that much can be done institutionally to correct it, since it is the institutions themselves that are manifestations, representatives, and forceful propagators of the problem. Thus it is that individual action may be the only possible remedy—a tiny and, in the large scheme of things, perhaps pathetic one, but for all that it may still be the most personally satisfying. To tend one’s own soul, and to try to teach and help others on a one-to-one, person-to-person basis to do the same in the midst of horrendous pressures to conform to an inhuman view of human life—maybe that is all that can be hoped for, as far as truly human activities are concerned, in the Brave New McWorld.

We have met the enemy, and. . .

A continuation of my recent conversation with some fellow Horror Writers Association members. (See my previous post for the first part.)

- - - - -

Bob, you write that people in general have always been dumb, and that the lamenting of this fact by an educated minority has always gone on, and so the whole issue is passé and boring. You also write that modern technological progress is surely an indicator that really, in the end, we aren't all that dumb.

Yes, the laments over low intelligence have a long and distinguished pedigree, going back to well before the 40-year mark that you cite (as I'm sure you're aware). It was a series of public outcries over what was widely perceived as the dreadful state of public education in America in the 1930s that inspired Mortimer Adler, Robert Hutchins, and a few others to lay the foundations for what became the "Great Books" movement, which has experienced a kind of resurrection over the past five or ten years. Farther back, in the middle and late nineteenth century, one can find, for example, Henri Amiel in his Journal Intime lamenting the moral and intellectual state of the French and Swiss student bodies, and predicting an "Americanized" future for the world, in which a distinctly American-ish uncritical democratic attitude would cause the level of public intelligence and discourse in the Western world to devolve downward to the lowest common denominator. Farther back, in 1802 Wordsworth expressed similar unhappiness with the effects of urbanization and popular theatre, among other things, in contributing to a move toward moral and intellectual numbness and savageness among the general population of England and Europe. And so on.

But the thing is, the mere fact that people have said these types of things in the past doesn’t invalidate them now. Nor does the hypothesis, which I suspect is true, that the people in every historical era whose words and ideas tend to dominate mass public discourse—specifically, highly educated people who are thirty-years of age and older—are the very ones who might be expected, by virtue of their demographics, to look with disgust and despair upon the relative roughness of the younger generation. Even given the fact of a historical precedent for decrying public dumbness and the probable prejudice on the part of those doing the decrying, there’s still evidence to back up the claim that an especially dire “dumbing down” is underway in America right now, and that this is just one prominent aspect of an overall cultural and civilizational decline.

As for the idea that technological progress belies this dumbing down, we’re talking apples and oranges here. The dumbing down I’m talking about doesn’t involve declining scores in math and science, although that’s probably part of it. The kind that concerns me is the widespread loss of historical consciousness and cultural memory, the death of the “cultural literacy” that E.D. Hirsch wrote about in the 1980s. As it so happens, technological progress may in fact aid and abet this process by enabling the creation of a physical and mental environment that is ever more alienated and buffered from the real world of existential reality. Jacque Ellul’s The Technological Society, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly, Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, and many more books have diagnosed and chronicled this phenomenon from various angles.

* * * * *

Jesse, you wrote, “When I moved out into the business world, though, I saw folks who went to high school in earlier decades (50s, 40s, etc.) making the same types of mistakes, and expressing the same type of ignorance (ignorance, not stupidity). If the ‘traditional’ way of teaching worked so well, we should have a nation of well-spoken, well-read folks in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.”

Actually, the 1940s and 1950s were the golden age of the “progressive education” movement, whose student-centered philosophy sounds very much like the ideas you outline in your post. It is this movement, as aided by the likes of influential figures like John Dewey, that a great many people have recognized as forming the beginning of the end of American education. It first took hold in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Today, in the aftermath of the 1960s, its central tenets have pretty much become gospel in the world of educational theory. So the historical tipping point that divides today’s institutionalized educational chaos and ineffectiveness from an earlier era when things were, in fact, done considerably better, is accurately located somewhere around 1900 or shortly thereafter. We’re currently caught up in a very large, in fact an epic, historical cycle, of which the educational issue is but a single small but important facet.

Jesse, you also wrote, “If you have ever had a job where you work heavily with the general public, you will know that things have never really been that different.” Yes, I know what you mean. It’s all too easy to diagnose cultural problems like an armchair anthropologist from ages past, without going to the trouble of gaining real-world, hands-on contact in order to lend concrete substance to one’s thoughts. A teaching job obviously doesn’t count as contact with the general public, since the public school classroom is almost hermetically sealed off, as it were, from the wider society at large. But I’ve only taught for four years now. Before that I worked for several years in sales jobs and media production, which put me in direct contact with the public. So I’m quite familiar with what you’re talking about. Yes, generally poor reading, writing, and thinking skills are quite in evidence among most groups I’ve encountered and worked with. But then, I also know that neither my little span of years, nor yours, nor anybody else’s, qualifies as long or wide enough to make the determination, based solely on personal experience, that “things have never really been that different.” In fact things have been different, but not in our lifetime or that of anybody else living today.

Jesse, you also wrote, “As far as the ‘college as job training’ part goes, most kids have little choice but to see it that way. Today's economic realities have forced that situation on them.” I agree. That’s why I’m not blaming them, since they’re in the same boat we are. We’re all caught up in the current. I’m a runt compared to educated people of the past. The next generation will be, and is already proving itself to be, more runtish still. I’m simply interested in gaining an insight into what’s really going on with all this. And it’s a deeply personal interest, since I’m concerned with gaining some sort of accurate perspective on, and understanding of, both myself and the environment into which I’ve been thrown.

Glenn, you wrote that some people like to read and some don’t, and many non-readers achieve considerable conventional success in life, whereas on the other side of the coin, being an avid reader is no guarantee of finding happiness or success. “I don't understand,” you wrote, “why others don't make time to read, but then again, I never made time for sports.”

Fair enough, but the problem with aliteracy, at least from a social and cultural perspective, is that traditional American political institutions are built upon the idea of a reasonably educated and informed populace that can, for example, read a newspaper and understand both the overt meanings and the nuances of what’s being said, and can also bring to this reading a fund of general background knowledge (that “cultural literacy” again) which will illuminate and inform it. In the age of mass electronic media, it’s also important to be able to recognize manipulative propaganda techniques as they are built into sound bites and visual images.

Where is this critical reasoning ability to come from? How is it to be trained? Short of everybody’s engaging frequently in Socratic dialogues with people and groups more intelligent and critically able than themselves, this training of the intellect will only come about through reading. Of course it will never be the case, nor should we wish it to be, that everybody will learn to love reading as a primary pastime; that, for example, people who like sports will throw down their footballs and pick up in their place the complete works of Shakespeare. But the current division of the populace into the rapidly diminishing portion that reads regularly and well and the rapidly increasing portion that never reads anything at all, is a sign of a deep and troubling shift in fundamental cultural attitudes. If you haven’t had your intellect trained by learning to read with ease and make critical judgments about what you read, then when you seek to gain information about your society and culture, and to make decisions based on this—as during an election season, or as regards lending support or opposition to policy propositions (e.g. abortion issues, scientific research issues, science vs. “creation science,” race issues, civil liberties issues, the “war on terrorism,” the war in Iraq, etc.), you’re pretty much at the mercy of the sounds and images hurled at you by mass media culture. And you only know how to deal with these at their shallowest surface levels. In short, you’re gallingly susceptible to being manipulated by demagoguery.

* * * * *

An orphan thought to append to all this: It’s so very easy to regard oneself as the measure of all that is right, acceptable, and good. It’s all too easy, for example, to assume that because things were a certain way when one was growing up, then that’s the way they ought to be (the old “It was good enough for me. . ." shtick). Similarly, it’s so very easy to apply this same attitude to ourselves collectively: to look at oneself and one’s adult peers, and to notice our relative merits and faults, and to notice a kinship among our attitudes and abilities, and from this to conclude that since we “turned out okay” then things are pretty much right with the world, and that those who say otherwise are just overwrought busybodies.

This is fallacious because it begs the question of whether we really have, in fact, turned out okay. As I said above, I really do feel like a runt compared to earlier generations of what were considered “educated” people. This is not just because of lowered educational standards and the resulting lack of a generalized, ground-level knowledge about the world, but also because of my own distraction-prone nature, which I attribute to in significant measure to my television saturated youth. I come up against my own limitations daily, when I read books and discover gaps in my knowledge that were simply assumed in the past to be part of the equipage of every literate person. I come up against them when I face the buzzing din of contemporary media culture and do not feel at all up to the task of understanding or making judgments about politicians, political issues, economic issues, social controversies, and the like, in contrast to the relative assuredness of people in past ages when it was assumed that being educated meant being competent in such things. I come up against my limitations when I am sunk in the mire of my own lethargy and scatteredness and can barely force myself to focus on pursuing a line of reasoning or reflection, or perhaps pursuing my authorial and musical activities, as opposed to diffusing out into the claimless, expectation-less world of television or the Internet.

When I look around, I see these same tendencies displayed by, and rooted in, most of the people around me. So I really am not at all convinced that we have turned out okay as a generation. In fact, I think we are possessed of smallish souls, and that we are presently engaged in the task of passing on a magnified version of this smallishness to our children. Not that there’s really, ultimately, anything to do to halt or reverse this. Like Bob said, “The dumb are taking over the Earth, and the only thing left for smart people is to keep things in running order, and hide.” I’m just not so sure that I, or we, should necessarily be numbered among the “smart” at this point. Maybe collectively we’re the ones that the few remaining smart people would do well to flee from.

The Future Is Now: Death of intellectual curiosity

Recently on the message board for the Horror Writers Association, of which I am a member, somebody posted a link to an article titled "Lack of curiosity is curious." The author of the article, J. Peder Zane, describes the current decline of intellectual curiosity that characterizes American culture and society, including, most strikingly, masses of students on college and university campuses. He attributes this phenomenon to various causes, including the dominance of the consumerist mentality and the shifting economic realities that have virtually forced students to view university studies not as an opportunity for pursuing and acquiring a liberal education, but simply as job training.

The entire article can be read here:

   http://www.triangle.com/books/zane/story/2833105p-9283263c.html

My response to it, including my responses to the comments left by several fellow HWA members, was/is as follows:

Personally, I think the author of this piece hits not just one, but several nails directly on their heads, to wit:

". . . the mind-set that puts work at the center of American life and the deep fear spawned by the rise of globalization and other free market approaches that have turned job security into an anachronism. In this frightening new world, students do not turn to universities for mind expansion but vocational training. In the parlance of journalism, they want news they can use."

If you’ll pardon a not-so-small rant, which perhaps shouldn’t be dignified with the label “jeremiad”:

I am currently in my fourth year of teaching high school English. I teach sophomores through seniors. Over the past few years, and then more intensively over the past few months, I have questioned several classrooms full of students regarding their thoughts about their formal education and how it relates to the larger scheme of their life. I haven't done this in stereotypical "teacherly" fashion, either; I enjoy a great rapport with my students, and I've asked them in answering my question to forget all about the clichéd crap they're fed full of on a daily basis by adults (some teachers, some not) who try to impress upon them the importance of petty school-isms for "life in the real world." I've told them that I really want them to share, as far as they're comfortable doing, what they want out of life, and/or what they feel driven or called to do on their own time, whenever they're not fulfilling external obligations such as school assignments. And I've asked them to name any possible connection they can see between what they do and (supposedly) learn at school, on the one hand, and what they love and how they expect to live their lives on the other.

What I've discovered is that a huge portion of them, and I'm speaking of kids whom I like, and who like me, really don't have much of an answer when they're asked about what they enjoy doing, or how this relates or doesn't relate to their school lives. The most popular answers to the first part of the question are 1) hanging out with friends, 2) sleeping, 3) “I don’t know,” 4) playing video games, and 5) playing some kind of sports. The most popular answer to the second part of the question – that is, what does all this school stuff have to do with your life? – is a blank look. Those who do offer an answer phrase it entirely in terms of the canned truth-isms they’ve been told: “You can’t get a good job if you don’t know how to read.” “Out in the real world, you have to know how to read and do math.” And when I ever-so-gently inform them once again that they don’t have to say such things if they don’t really mean them, that if they have thoughts that deviate from the party line, that’s fine with me, they either assure me that they do indeed mean what they’ve said, or else they retreat into that shrug-filled blank look into which the first group has already fallen.

I realize all this might simply be due to the fact that they attend public school under duress, just like the rest of us did, and so they may not be inclined to answer such questions truthfully or enthusiastically, or even to care about them. Maybe the very environment in which the question is posed serves as a deterrent to young people's feeling a real interest in it. But then, this in itself says something about the state of formal schooling and students’ attitudes. Either way, it’s not a positive situation.

Mike – You write, “I think it is nothing new. Every 15-20 years or so, there are waves of articles that come out about this very subject. I recall, back in the '80s, when I was in college, William Bennett, Alan Bloom and company bemoaning how dumb my classmates and I were supposed to be.”

I entered the University of Missouri in 1988, right at the height of Bloom’s popularity, and I read his The Closing of the American Mind for one of my first semester’s classes. (It was my choice, not the professor’s.) Since then I’ve read it twice more. Recently I revisited it. And I’m still astonished at how accurate, in my own experience, Bloom’s diagnosis of the culture has been. And not only accurate, but prescient. In his chapter on the decline of reading, he said that college writing instructors had been telling him that they couldn’t teach writing to students who didn’t read, and that it was simply impossible to get them to read. Bloom said this in the mid-late 1980s. Today, the trend he observed has reached proportions that surely wouldn’t have surprised him, but that would have nonetheless galled him. I spent the years from 1996 to 2003 earning an M.A. and a teaching certificate at Southwest Missouri State University. The stories I could tell about professors and teaching assistants who were appalled at the nearly non-existent reading and writing skills of hordes of undergraduate students at that time are legion. This is indeed something that has only come on in the last thirty or forty years, and its pace is accelerating.

Tangentially, whenever I’m speaking to my students, if I want to make reference to any sort of common object of knowledge in order to illustrate a point about the dramatic structure of stories, or about irony or other literary techniques, or about anything else having to do with stories and literature – and the necessity arises almost daily of referring to a common fund of knowledge in order to illuminate some new subject or story we’re studying – I find of late that the only thing I can mention with any reasonable degree of confidence that everybody will be familiar with it is the Harry Potter stories. Almost all of the teens have seen the movies. Several have read one or more of the novels. I can also refer to The Lord of the Rings, but I have yet to find a student this year who has read even one of Tolkien’s books, although I do have a student who has read a couple of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books, so he has a minor grounding in literary fantasy. But anyway, I simply can’t expect them to know much of anything. In fact, it’s astonishing how many of them are oblivious to mass media culture. Not that they don’t know the names and faces of actors and rock stars, but if I mention the name of any movie director besides Rob Zombie, there’s a general look of blankness. I tried it with Spielberg once and had a couple of students respond, none too confidently, “Isn’t he the guy who made Saving Private Ryan?” I've also been shocked and dismayed at how many of them are functionally ignorant of Stephen King. Sure, they know some of his movies, but as far as the man himself, the overwhelming consensus is an attitude of dull, suspicious disinterest, expressed in the uninformed statement or question, "Stephen King – he's really weird, right? Like, he's that horror guy."

To interrupt myself briefly, one natural response to this is, of course, to say, “Well, all of that constitutes the point. You’re the teacher. Teach them something instead of just complaining about their ignorance!” The problem with this attitude is that it doesn’t recognize or acknowledge the near impossibility of accomplishing much in the way of a formal, let alone a traditional liberal, education when the cultural zeitgeist is working overtime to subvert, obliterate, and make irrelevant everything that should properly go into such an education. How do you know where to start when you can hardly start anywhere, when you can’t expect anything?

Zane, the author of the article Thomas linked to, also writes, “In comforting response to these exigencies [e.g. the contemporary overload of trivial information and concomitant trivializing of real knowledge; the transformation by default of education into job-training, etc.] our culture gives us a pass, downplaying the importance of knowledge, culture, history and tradition. Not too long ago, students might have been embarrassed to admit they'd never heard of Jack Kerouac. Now they're permitted to say 'whatever.’”

I’ll simply avow that I observe this among my own students on a daily basis. The heart and center of American culture at large, as in outside the walls of the schools, has moved decisively away from being focused on anything that resembles traditional ideas and ideals of literacy and liberal education. The point of life is perceived in consumerist and commercial terms, e.g., getting a “good job” (meaning a well-paying one), owning a house and car, being able to buy things, having access to the right medicines and medical insurance, and so on. For that matter, life inside the schools isn’t much different; just last week I attended a professional development training seminar for teachers, the topic of which was the use of SmartBoard technology in the classroom. Elementary-level teachers were encouraged to use a Website that features media celebrities reading storybooks to the camera. As a demonstration, we saw Lou Diamond Phillips reading The Polar Express. Teachers were told that they might use this site to entertain their students, perhaps playing it in the mornings as students are arriving. Personally, I was more interested in the fact that when the demonstrating teacher called up the main page, the top right corner featured the prominent advertising tag, “Made possible by a generous grant from Verizon,” complete with Verizon’s corporate logo. The classroom where this seminar took place is one of the new “E-Mints” classrooms in our school. These were obtained via a grant. E-Mints classrooms integrate computer technology through every aspect of the classroom experience. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. The real education being given here is that all of these toys, and the fun they bring with them, are essential to education and life. In other words, regardless of the ostensible content of a given lesson, what’s really taught in these new electronic classrooms is the lesson of corporate consumerism. We’re educating new generations of consumers.

Speaking of which, Zane goes on to say, “Instead of a mainstream reverence for those who produce or appreciate works that represent the summit of human achievement, we have a corporatized and commodified culture that hypes the latest trend, the next new thing.”

Has anybody noticed just how scarifyingly accurate Bradbury’s vision of the future in Fahrenheit 451 has turned out to be? Or Huxley’s Brave New World? Not to play Cassandra here – or actually, on second thought, I’ll gladly do it – but the rise of (un)Reality TV, whose popularity, as its makers and marketers know full well, arises from the idea and feeling that we, the viewers, are watching and participating in the lives of real people on that screen; and the rise of video game culture – not the arcade hounds of the 1980s and early 1990s, but Generation Xbox, whose every spare waking moment is swallowed by immersive games; and the rise of the “blockbuster” mentality in mass entertainment, wherein everything, no matter how trivial or juvenile, is now marketed frenetically as an “event” – all of this calls helplessly to mind the vacant, staring populace of Bradbury’s dystopia, who sit watching wall-sized video screens all day long, and who drown their private thoughts with a constant barrage of earphoned music, and who pop pills to keep themselves content. Think of Truffaut’s cinematic version of Bradbury’s novel, wherein Montag’s wife Linda adores her video “family,” and then compare this to today’s (un)Reality TV. Or think of Huxley’s dystopia wherein the citizens of this artificial “paradise” distract themselves perpetually with meaningless games, sexual amusements, and other pastimes: the orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumblepuppy, “feelies” (movies with tactile enhancements), and so on. As Morris Berman said in his 2000 book The Twilight of American Culture, we’re pretty much living in Bradbury’s (and I daresay, Huxley’s) vision right now, or if not, then we have at most twenty years before we arrive fully there.

Books, visual media, and the seat of reason

In a comment on my previous post, "How do you speak to the center of an aliterate culture?", grumpyteacher1 said, "To a large degree, I think, we are what we read. If we don't read anything, we probably aren't anything. I suppose the same could be true of what we watch, though.

I agree that watching (as in movies, television, plays, sporting events) is fully as effective a method of forming human beings as reading. The question, of course, is what we watch and how we watch it.

In this vein, I can't help but think of the passage in Fahrenheit 451 wherein Bradbury, through the mouthpiece of one of his characters, acknowledges that there's nothing especially talismanic, as in exclusively good and true and valuable, about books. The crucial issue in question, he says, is how much attention to detail, to the artful and authentic re-presenting of our experiences as human beings, we have successfully and deliberately poured into a given artifact or activity. And for this purpose, movies and television might serve us just as well as books.

But as Bradbury points out, it is a matter of verfiable fact that we have not done this with movies, television, and whatnot. For better or worse, it is books that have served as the medium into which the best, deepest, most artful and authentic representations of human experience have been poured. There are notable exceptions in other media, of course -- God knows there are some wonderful films that are well worth watching, studying, and living with in the same way that one reads, studies, and lives with great books -- but the fact that they are indeed exceptions only underscores the point.

Having said all that, I do think that in the aforementioned passage from Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury may have gone a little overboard in his blanket assertion that any medium would serve the purpose as well as books do, given the proper level of artistry and passion. Because the transaction that takes place between a reader and a written text is sui generis. It is qualititatively different from the transaction that takes place between a viewer and a film, or any other visually-based medium. There is a deeper level of intimacy involved since the experience of reading takes place not only before one's eyes, in relation to the printed page (or computer monitor), but in the depths of one's verbal mind. Just as watching films and television inevitably and subliminally trains a person in the tropes and grammars of a given style within a given visual medium, so does private reading train a person's inner voice, not to mention one’s thinking mind, which is so closely related to that voice as to be indistinguishable. The act and experience of reading, it seems to me, is inherently located much closer to the inner seat of thinking and reasoning than these other media can ever be. And I'm saying this as an inveterate cinephile. I wouldn't ever want to give up my beloved movies. But I deplore the fact that movies, along with television, video games, and casual Internet browsing, have come so far along the path of replacing in so many people’s lives the intensive, passionate, private reading of books.

I feel like I want to advance the thesis that a purely, or even predominantly, visual culture, meaning one in which most people think and are informed primarily in terms of visual images -- a situation akin to McLuhan’s post-literate world, I guess -- is necessarily a barbaric one. I don’t have any facile quotations or historical references within easy reach to support this, but I’m guessing they're easy enough to locate.